Tsvangirai May Face Internal Challenge After Vote Loss

Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai said, “They’ve used their power to subvert the will of the people,” Tsvangirai said. “The fraudulent and stolen election has plunged Zimbabwe into a constitutional, political and economic crisis.” Photographer: Alexander Joe/AFP via Getty Images

Aug. 7 (Bloomberg) -- Morgan Tsvangirai’s rise from labor
leader to Zimbabwe prime minister and presidential contender
ended last week in his heaviest ever electoral defeat at the
hands of Robert Mugabe. Now some analysts believe he may have to
quit politics.

The July 31 election, in which President Mugabe, 89, won 61
percent to 34 percent and his party gained a two-thirds majority
in parliament, was the third time Tsvangirai lost to the only
leader Zimbabwe has known since independence in 1980. His
allegations of vote rigging, echoed by the U.S., the U.K. and
local monitors, found little support among most African nations,
which endorsed the vote as credible.

“People are now saying he lost this election very badly,
he shouldn’t have gone into it knowing that there was no even
playing field,” Gilbert Khadiagala, a professor in
international relations at the University of the Witwatersrand
in Johannesburg, said Aug. 7 in an interview. “There is
essentially a crisis of leadership now. You need a new leader.”

In almost 14 years as head of the Movement for Democratic
Change, Tsvangirai, 61, has endured repeated arrests, police
beatings and a treason trial after he was accused of plotting to
assassinate Mugabe in 2002. He served under Mugabe as prime
minister in a power-sharing government after disputed elections
in 2008.

Political Violence

While he won more votes than Mugabe in the first-round vote
that year, Tsvangirai pulled out of a run-off after he said as
many as 200 of his supporters died in a wave of political
violence. The region’s political bloc, the 15-member Southern
African Development Community, brokered the deal for the unity
government. It endorsed last week’s vote as free and peaceful,
while withholding comment on its fairness.

Questioned about whether he would step aside, Tsvangirai
told reporters at his residence in Harare, the capital, on Aug.
3 that he had the “full backing” of his party and the public.
“We did not lose this election,” he said. “This is not a
personal issue, this is a national issue.”

While thousands of his supporters were turned away from
polling stations last week because they were not on the voters’
registry, Mugabe’s supporters were bussed in and issued with
voting slips without having to register, Tsvangirai said on Aug.
2. Tsvangirai’s votes declined slightly, as Mugabe won almost
twice as many as he did five years ago, according to official
figures.

‘Deeply Flawed’

Local observers and western governments joined Tsvangirai
in criticizing the conduct of the vote. The U.S. called it
“deeply flawed,” and the U.K. said it had “grave concerns
over the conduct of the election.”

Mugabe dismissed the concerns.

“The enemy is he who is behind Tsvangirai, who is behind
the MDC,” Mugabe told party members in Harare today. “The
British and their allies.

The MDC was formed in 1999, handing Mugabe his first
polling defeat the next year when it successfully campaigned
against a new constitution. Springing out of the labor union
movement in Harare, the party won massive support in urban
areas, where more than 40 percent of the population lives.

At the end of the latest election campaign, tens of
thousands of supporters wearing the party’s red color and using
its open-palmed hand signal attended Tsvangirai’s final campaign
rally at the foot of Zanu-PF’s Harare headquarters.

The MDC ‘‘saw a lot of people at their rallies and assumed
they were voters which wasn’t the case,” Trevor Maisiri, a
researcher at the Brussels-based International Crisis Group,
said in an interview in Harare. “They thought the level of
their support would overcome the level of fraud. They were
overconfident. The MDC is very weakened as an opposition
party.”

Parliamentary Decline

Having won 100 seats in 2008, the MDC was left with 49 in
parliament. It will also gain a share of 60 new spots reserved
for women and allocated according to what percentage of the vote
each party took in each province.

Under the power-sharing government, the party helped return
the economy to growth after seven years of recession and
bringing the inflation rate to single digits after peaking at
what the the International Monetary Fund said was 500 million
percent in 2008. Finance Minister Tendai Biti formalized the
previously illegal use of multiple currencies. The central bank
yesterday said it has no immediate plans to reintroduce the
national currency.

The main index on the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange fell 1
percent today, bringing its decline since Mugabe’s victory to 13
percent. Most banks in the country have stopped issuing new
loans because of concern over policy, two chief executive
officers said Aug. 7, declining to be identified because they
didn’t want to anger the government.

MDC Divisions

The MDC has been wracked by divisions for years. A faction
split over a dispute in the party’s approach to Senate elections
in 2005. Another MDC grouping contested last week’s poll against
Tsvangirai’s party. That split the party’s vote in several
constituencies, costing it seats in parliament.

Tsvangirai said he realized that the MDC’s plan to
challenge the election results in court probably won’t yield
results because the judiciary is “compromised” by appointments
made by Mugabe.

While Zanu-PF has been preparing for this election since
its loss in the 2008 vote, the MDC has rested on its laurels,
according to Dumisani Nkomo, the Chief Executive Officer of
Habakkuk Trust, a Christian community development organization.

“The MDC should be sober and review how ZANU-PF outfoxed
them,” Nkomo said in an interview from the southern city of
Bulawayo. “There is no time to mourn. This idea of appealing
and going to court is a waste of time. Instead, they should plan
and strategize for the next elections”

Biti, the MDC’s secretary-general Biti has been the person
most-often cited as a possible new party leader. Many voters
believe Tsvangirai remains the MDC’s best option.

“Politics is a dirty game,” Joe Mbesa, 32, said in
between washing cars in Harare’s Warren Park area. “Morgan is
OK. It’s not his fault.”